"When I was studying English literature at the University of Tokyo, even though I had no theater experience at all, I got the chance to direct 'Macbeth,' " 33-year-old Ryunosuke Kimura explained when we met recently at a rehearsal studio in downtown Tokyo.

"To start my research, I rented a video of 'Ninagawa Macbeth' — but I was amazed because it seemed entirely different from William Shakespeare's 'Macbeth,' " he recalled.

Indeed it was amazingly different, because the late Yukio Ninagawa set his 1980 masterpiece in samurai-era Japan, not medieval Scotland, and he also filled most of the stage with a giant butsudan (household Buddhist altar) as what he termed "a tool to connect the Scottish story to Japanese people."